By RICHARD SEVERO

Published: May 19, 2004

Correction Appended

Tony Randall, the sardonic actor with the commanding voice and precise diction whose career in light-comic parts in Hollywood and on the New York stage seemed the perfect preparation for his signature role as the fussbudget Felix Unger in the classic television series ''The Odd Couple,'' died on Monday in Manhattan. He was 84 and lived in Manhattan.

Mr. Randall died in his sleep at N.Y.U. Medical Center with his wife, Heather, by his side, said Joe Trentacosta of Springer Associates, Mr. Randall's publicity firm. Mr. Trentacosta said Mr. Randall had been hospitalized since December, when he underwent a triple heart bypass and later contracted pneumonia.

Theaters on Broadway dimmed their lights last night at 8 in tribute.

Mr. Randall felt at home in Shakespeare and Shaw as well as in expounding the virtues of Verdi and other operatic composers, which he did on many occasions on public broadcasting and during intermission programs of Saturday broadcasts of the Metropolitan Opera.

But he was best known for comedy, for which the public was eager to accept him, even when the material was flimsy.

He had so many frothy parts in the movies and on television that Mr. Randall slipped into sitcoms ''as if into a warm bath, to play with the rubber ducks the writers have provided,'' John Leonard wrote in The New York Times in 1976. ''Dignity is his wash rag. He is so talented that one wouldn't blame him for a hint of disdain, even of contempt, for many of the lines he has had to speak, the predicaments to be endured. There never has been any such hint. He somehow civilizes the material.'' Suave and urbane, his rich baritone the vehicle for the clipped diction of the demanding elocution professor that he easily could have been, Mr. Randall said he had been pleased to play Felix Unger, whose roommate and temperamental opposite was Oscar Madison, the slovenly, unkempt, cigar-smoking sportswriter played by Jack Klugman. These two New Yorkers were thrown together by the vicissitudes of life (mostly rejection by their wives) and made the worst of it, in a series that ran from 1970 to '75, continung in reruns.

Founder of Repertory Theater

But Mr. Randall, who won an Emmy Award for his portrayal, made clear that he did not want to be always or only thought of as Felix Unger, because he could do so many other things.

He had a great love of repertory theater and in 1991 founded, with a million dollars of his own money and much more from the moneyed sources who backed his commercial acting, the National Actors Theater in New York. Its purpose was to keep the works of playwrights like Ibsen, Chekhov and Arthur Miller before the public, and at a reasonable price. The critics were not especially kind to his efforts, and he said more than once that he was especially disappointed in the reviews that his company got from The New York Times. But he stuck with it, saying he refused ''to be brushed aside'' by The Times or any other newspaper.

He made clear, whenever he was asked, that his favorite role in more than 50 years of acting was that of a middle-aged American diplomat in the Broadway stage production of ''M. Butterfly,'' David Henry Hwang's 1988 Tony winner. In it, Mr. Randall's character falls in love with a gorgeous Japanese woman who turns out to be a male spy in disguise.

''It was the closest I ever came to being the kind of actor I believe in,'' he said on more than one occasion.

Tony Randall was born Leonard Rosenberg in Tulsa, Okla., on Feb. 26, 1920, the son of Mogscha Rosenberg, a dealer in artworks and antiques, and the former Julia Finston.

He was drawn to acting as a child. He had a most expressive, elastic face and used it in class when he was not expected to, with the result that one of his grade school teachers sent a note home, asking his parents to order him to stop making funny faces. He appeared in his first production in grade school and liked it so much that he decided acting was what he would do with the rest of his life. But when he went to Central High School in Tulsa, he was unsuccessful when he tried out for parts in school plays, perhaps because he then had a childhood stammer he was in the process of overcoming.

As a teenager he went to see plays whenever he could, and on one occasion Katharine Cornell came to town in a touring production of ''Romeo and Juliet.'' Mr. Randall went backstage to get her autograph, for which he was asked to pay 25 cents; Cornell informed him that such money went to charity. She borrowed the boy's pen to write her name.

''Someday,'' Mr. Randall said, ''I'll give you mine.''

''Autograph or pen?'' Miss Cornell inquired.

After high school Mr. Randall enrolled as a speech and drama major at Northwestern University in Evanston, Ill., but dropped out after a year and moved to New York, where he began to study acting at the Neighborhood Playhouse School of the Theater. His teachers there included Sanford Meisner, a stern taskmaster, and Martha Graham, the dancer, who gave him lessons on how to move about the stage gracefully.

Correction: May 20, 2004, Thursday An obituary of the actor Tony Randall yesterday misstated the nationality of a character in the Broadway drama ''M. Butterfly,'' in which he played an American diplomat. The diplomat's love interest -- a spy who turns out to be a man in disguise -- is Chinese, not Japanese. Correction: May 25, 2004, Tuesday An obituary of the actor Tony Randall on Wednesday included an erroneous reference from his publicity agency to the whereabouts of his wife, Heather, when he died. The agency later said she had been on her way to the hospital, not at his bedside.